How it really happened
Speaking to a crowd at the Harvard Allston Education Portal, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed smiled when an audience member asked: Did Thomas Jefferson love Sally Hemings? It’s a familiar question for Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a history professor with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She has heard it at most every event she’s attended since she wrote “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” about Jefferson’s relationship with his slave and the way scholars have treated it. The book was published in 1997. “I find it hard to believe that [Jefferson] would have just a purely sexual relationship with someone over the course of 38 years, and have seven children with her,” Gordon-Reed said. In addition, there “aren’t any other stories of him being with any other person.” The strong turnout at the Ed Portal’s...